The science of artificial intelligence is a program to accomplish the Socratic injunction, "Know Thyself." The late John McCarthy, Ph.D., invented LISP, the major language today used for artificial intelligence. Here he discusses the history of artificial intelligence and the future role which non-monotonic reasoning will play in enabling computers to simulate the human mind.

"Well, there are two ways of looking at things. You can either look at it from the point of view of biology, or from the point of view of computer science. From the point of view of biology, you could try to imitate the nervous system insofar as you understood the nervous system, or you could try to imitate human psychology insofar as you understand human psychology. The computer-science way of looking at it says that we look at the world and we try to see what problems it presents in order to achieve goals and think about the world rather than about the biology per se. And I would say that the computer-science approach is the one that so far has had the most success."